Winslow Homer

Homer's "Snap the Whip." Steve Miller/Associated Press

To a degree, Winslow Homer has become synonymous with a certain quaint, populist, long-gone Americana, and this has caused people to misgauge his achievement as the greatest painter America produced in the 19th century. Quaint he never was, in art or in life. In his later years, he was a loner, the archetypal Yankee salt in his cottage on the Maine coast, though the truth is that Homer was always too diverse and complicated to be slotted into any of the usual categories.

From his very first oil painting, of a Civil War sharpshooter — an accomplished image that in its compactness and lack of anecdotal detail was unlike any art coming out of the war — to the seascapes he painted toward the end of his career, Homer comes across as an original. You see where, along the way, he echoed Monet or Tissot, Turner or Bocklin, and where he borrowed from Japanese or Greek art: he took what he needed and not more. For unlike so many lesser American painters of his day, Homer never succumbed to the prestige of Europe or lost himself in emulation of its fashions. He stubbornly kept to his goal: to create an art of empirical lucidity freighted with symbolism, meaning an art more sophisticated than it first appears, and also determinedly, self-consciously American.

Homer was born in Boston in 1836, was apprenticed to a commercial lithographer and then did magazine illustrations. At 25, he went to Virginia to cover the Civil War for Harper's Weekly. His first wood engravings from the front were witty portraits and adept, formulaic views of clashing armies. But his paintings were weightier, unsentimental and immediate. "Home, Sweet Home" shows two soldiers beside their pitched tents, an image of nothing, really, yet moving for what Homer doesn't paint: neither overt sadness nor heroism, though both are implied in the postures and partly shrouded gaze of the soldiers. This quality of understatement, a kind of pictorial stoicism, prevents his art from sliding into caricature.

From the battle front, Homer moved to New York. "Snap the Whip," his classic painting of a friezelike line of boys playing in a spring field beside a red schoolhouse, is partly nostalgia — the rural life of the schoolhouse was already giving way to urban explosion — but it is also heraldic. Homer could make milkmaids resemble caryatids, and his suggestion of loftiness and solemnity in images of ordinary people recalls Vermeer. Above all, it helps to explain why he is embraced as the quintessential American painter, because in ways you sometimes scarcely realize he creates a mythology out of the very ordinariness of American life.

He revisited the South in the mid-1870's to witness the change, or rather the absence of it, that Reconstruction had brought to the lives of former slaves. The result was a work like "The Cotton Pickers." Stately, silent and with barely a flicker of sadness on their faces, the two black women in the painting are unmistakable in their disillusionment: they picked cotton before the war and they are still picking cotton afterward.

Homer became increasingly wary and restless over these years. In 1881 he went to England and painted the fishermen and women on the rugged, rainswept coast near Newcastle, making them nearly into gods, their arms akimbo against the sea, their clothes billowing in the wind like the sails of ships. Two years later, he decided to quit New York for the remoteness of Prout's Neck in Maine, where he spent his last 27 years, save for expeditions to places like Florida, Quebec, Cuba and the Adirondacks. The watercolors from those trips are among the finest ever known, peerless examples in a notoriously tricky medium. They capture the autumnal shadows and watery reflections that Homer saw on his fishing trips in the Adirondack woods, and the enveloping turquoise of the Caribbean.

"I deny that I am a recluse as is generally understood by that term," Homer once told a correspondent who wanted to visit him in Maine. "Neither am I an unsociable hog. I wrote you, it's true, that it was not convenient to receive a visitor, that was to save you as well as myself. Since you must know it, I have never yet had a bed in my house. I do my own work. No other man or woman within half a mile & four miles from railroad & P.O. This is the only life in which I am permitted to mind my own business."